Episode 15: Music From Before Time with Ted Leo

This is the Picture of Temperatures/Densities in the Cosmic Microwave Background. It was taken by the WMAP satellite!

Okay. So. Today’s Episode is MONUMENTAL. Both in terms of the ambitious scope of our topic, and the awesome guest!

Lets say I build you a nice time machine, and I send you back to the very early universe. Back when the universe was just a bath of electrons and protons and photons bouncing around: a plasma. You would hear a sound (Hey look! the sound has been recreated and posted to the internet!). And when the universe cooled enough, and the electrons and protons coupled up; these sound waves turned into the centers of gravitational collapse: forming galactic superclusters.

In other words: Music provided the blueprints for the structure of the universe. MONUMENTAL!

One thought on “Episode 15: Music From Before Time with Ted Leo”

Brilliant episode (as always)! One of my (many) favorite parts is how your metaphoric description of recombination (15 min in) starts out sounding very socially hetero-centric, but in the end you never actually say who gets together with who. (Here in “the states”, homophobia is such an insidious epidemic that we have to be hyper-aware of the warning signs!) I can see that this sort of comparison could be tricky, especially with people like me reading sociological mores into simple little sausage-dog analogies! 😉

Also i love yr implied nod to this in episode 48 (following Brian Sullivan’s explanation at 19:50) and the guest’s response (I’m not sure if it was Brent Knopf or Matt Sheehy). Once again yall proved not only yr brains and humor, but also yr moral turpitude!

(Drat! My quest to find something to revile you for has failed again! I’ll have to go back thru all the episodes again. ..)